Integrating disparate software systems often creates difficulties and costs due to complexities in infrastructure. At an enterprise level, integrating software systems requires quality assurance (QA) testing, which is becoming increasingly complex. The increasing complexity of software systems requires that QA test systems and software also have greater capabilities than predecessor applications.
For businesses, testing data systems requires thorough QA testing of integrated systems to ensure that data is properly routed between endpoints on the overall system. As legacy systems may often require integration with newer software systems, effective QA software must be able to test multiple processes and applications of varying types. Conventional QA integration testing software is often superficial as the complexity with testing integrated data systems often covers only the input and output of data for particular graphical user interfaces (GUI). For example, conventional QA integration testing software packages that are designed to be cross-platform compatible are often only capable of testing for the proper input and output of data from system GUIs. Conventional QA integration testing software is typically designed for GUI testing or testing only one particular component application of an overall larger system. Thorough testing of integrated software systems requires in-depth testing and evaluation across the entire platform and its individual and disparate components. This process can be costly if conventional QA integration testing software is used, and may be cost prohibitive if extensive custom coding is required. Moreover, for cost reasons typical testing software systems at present provide only single component coverage via software tools, missing major portions of integrated systems, or is done manually with very marginal coverage.
A large part of the costs associated with conventional QA integration testing software are due to the labor-intensive nature of development and integration. Although conventional “off-the-shelf” packages are produced by many software testing companies, specific integration testing with a particular system requires custom coding. Custom coding, in turn, requires platform-specific knowledge as well as testing application-specific knowledge that, when combined, requires significant labor and time costs.
Thus, what is needed is a solution for thoroughly testing integrated software packages that may be composed of disparate systems. There is a need for a solution for testing integrated software systems that automates manual labor intensive parts of testing. Further, there is a need for a solution for testing integrated software systems without incurring significant custom coding or labor costs.